We investigate absolute retracts for classes of hereditarily unicoherent continua, tree-like continua, λ- dendroids, dendroids and some other related ones. The main results are: (1) the inverse limits of trees with confluent bonding mappings are absolute retracts of hereditarily unicoherent continua; (2) each tree-like continuum is embeddable in a special way in a tree-like absolute retract for the class of hereditarily unicoherent continua; (3) a dendroid is an absolute retract for hereditarily unicoherent continua if and only if it can be embedded as a retract into the Mohler-Nikiel universal smooth dendroid
